ARMONK, NY, Aug 30, 2010: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it completed the acquisition of Storwize, a privately-held company based in Marlborough, MA. Financial details were not disclosed. The companies announced in July a definitive agreement to pursue the acquisition.

The Storwize company will become part of IBM Systems and Software Group. The technology aims to help organizations improve storage efficiency while lowering the cost of making primary data available for analytics and other applications.

Integrating Storwize’s Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) with its Storage solutions portfolio will help IBM to make it more affordable for clients to analyze massive amounts of data in order to provide new insights and business outcomes. The RACE technology complements other storage efficiency offerings like de-duplication (1).

“IBM is focused on helping clients reduce the cost and complexity of managing the vast amounts of data that are consistently growing year over year,” said Brian Truskowski, general manager, IBM System Storage and Networking. “Using the RACE technology can help IBM clients compress their primary data while preventing storage sprawl and lowering power and cooling costs.”

Storwize RACE:

Is the only storage solution that can compress primary data of multiple file types without affecting performance;

Can help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80% (2);

Has 35 patents pending and issued;

Works with many de-duplication, virtualization and other storage efficiency solutions;

Has over 100 customers across a wide range of industries such as energy, manufacturing, finance, insurance, telecommunications and cloud services.

The Storwize appliance will work with popular NAS systems such as IBM N series, as well as non-IBM NAS systems from EMC, HP, NetApp and others.